Any given era reflects a range of clothing styles. One of the problems of doing research into fashion history is that the items that have been preserved and the items that people have chosen to write about generally have been what I can only call "extreme" examples of relevant styles.

Think of it in terms of what you see if you look at W as opposed to what you see on the racks at Niemann Marcus or Nordstroms… as opposed to what you'd find at a real fashion house (if only there were any real fashion houses left).

Another problem is that a woman having her portrait painted wants to wear something unusual. She doesn't want to be painted in the sort of outfit she might wear to luncheon at the Carleton. That wouldn't be unusual enough or special enough. So what you get when you study portraits is an idiosynctratic representation.

Most photographs from the Edwardian era still depict people on their wedding day or other special occasions, although that is less true of "fashion leaders" than of other people.

We really are addressing different layers of society in Belle Époque. It's obvious that the clothing a servant wore would not mirror that of her employer. But its not just a matter of wealth or status. A "fashion leader" would wear different types of clothing than women of the same class and financial status might want to be bothered with. (Compare Diana Princess of Wales with Princess Anne in terms of fashion. Diana was a "fashion leader." While Anne dresses well, and expensively, she has never evinced any interest in being a doyenne of fashion.)

We also need to focus on the fact that country wear and town wear were different in terms of fabrics, colors and cut. A lacy white tea gown suitable a house party at somebody's country estate would not be suitable for London. But conversely, the sort of outfit suitable for making afternoon calls would have been seen as ostentatious in the country. Fabrics that were suitable for summer were not acceptable in winter.

Currently, people don't want to follow fashion rules like "no colored stones before five o'clock" and no white before Memorial Day. But the Edwardians LOVED such rules. If you didn't know the rules, you demonstrated the fact that you did not "belong."

A woman who wore an unsuitable color demonstrated her ignorance and her outsider status. For example, as soon as alizerine dyes were perfected, bright colors were OUT because any washer woman suddenly could afford crimson and purple. Lighter colors and whites demonstrated high status in two ways: they were costly to maintain in terms of woman-hours and they soiled rapidly, even in the country. So you needed a vast wardrobe and the ability to change your dress frequently throughout the day.

A person might as well be seen cutting lettuce with a knife at table as wearing the wrong thing at the wrong time. Others would recognize immediately that one did not "belong." People today fuss about the rules of ettiquette as being artificial and useless, but that point of view betrays a misunderstanding of the thrust of many of these "rules." They were deliberatly complex to ensure that outsiders were clearly marked and couldn't pass as quality when they were not.

And actually, color and fabric and pattern still betray one's origins in terms of class. There are "lower class" prints and colors and "high status" prints and colors.

The bottom line for Belle Époque is that it is currently winter in London, the air is full of coal smoke, the streets are covered in dirty snow, its cold and people would be dressing accordingly. Even fashion leaders.

Here is a link to an excellent website on fashion which contains an article on Fashion in the Edwardian Era with which I (mostly) agree. My only qualifier is that I think the author is not aware enough of the differences between town and country—but then it is a website, not a 500 page book on fashion history.